Warning: This video contains graphic images. Chicago officials released surveillance footage of the 2013 fatal shooting of Cedrick Chatman, 17, by a Chicago police officer. The Chicago Tribune edited this version only for length.

Warning: This video contains graphic images. Chicago officials released surveillance footage of the 2013 fatal shooting of Cedrick Chatman, 17, by a Chicago police officer. The Chicago Tribune edited this version only for length.

Seconds after a Chicago police officer opened fire on him as he ran from a South Side traffic stop, 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman had collapsed in the street when the officer's partner approached to take him into custody.

"I give up. I'm shot," Chatman said to Officer Lou Toth, according to Toth's statement to investigators at the scene.

A bullet had struck Chatman in the right side, pierced his heart and lodged in his spine. He died on the way to a hospital.

The detail of Chatman's last words was included in hundreds of pages of investigative records released by the city Friday that laid out how Chatman's suspected involvement in a violent robbery and carjacking ended with his fatal shooting less than a mile away.

The documents — which included detectives' reports from the scene, autopsy results, inventory logs, lineups and transcripts of witness interviews — show that Officer Kevin Fry consistently told investigators he saw Chatman turn with a dark object in his hand as he ran full speed across the busy South Shore neighborhood intersection in the early afternoon.

"Officer Fry said he believed that the object was a handgun and he was in fear of his partner's life, as Toth was in close proximity to the offender," said an incident report documenting Fry's initial interview with detectives. The object turned out to be a black iPhone box.

On a sunny January afternoon in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood three years ago, two plainclothes police officers pulled up to a silver Dodge Charger that dispatchers said had been taken in a violent carjacking a few blocks away.

Suddenly, 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman jumped out of the driver's...

(Jason Meisner)

Attorneys for Chatman's mother, who has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, contend the videos prove that Chatman was trying to get away from the police when Fry opened fire without justification.

The document dump came a day after surveillance footage from Chatman's January 2013 shooting was released by the city as it works to change a long-standing policy to keep evidence in police shootings under wraps. It is all part of the fallout since the release of the disturbing video of Laquan McDonald's fatal shooting by a Chicago police officer roiled the city, leading to the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and calls for the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez.

In lifting a protective order in the Chatman family's lawsuit Thursday, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ripped city attorneys for the about-face after months of fighting to keep the videos secret, sarcastically hailing the move as the "Age of Enlightenment."

But unlike the now-infamous dash-cam video of McDonald being shot 16 times, the videos in the Chatman case are dark and somewhat indistinct, showing mostly distant views of the shooting. The footage was obtained from a police surveillance camera as well as cameras outside a convenience store and by South Shore High School.

While various angles from the videos clearly show Chatman fleeing police, it's difficult to tell whether his blurred figure — covered at times by shadows cast from buildings on 75th Street — turned toward the officers before he was shot.

According to the police records released Friday, the incident unfolded shortly after 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2013, when Chatman and two friends — Akeem Clarke and Martel Odom — beat and robbed a man inside his Dodge Charger while negotiating a deal to buy cellphone service from him. After the beating, Chatman took off alone in the victim's car.

Fry and Toth, meanwhile, had been on routine patrol when they said they spotted the Charger rolling through a stop sign at 75th and Essex Avenue. They ran the car's Wisconsin license plates, but the car came back clean, so they didn't stop it at the time. When the call came over the radio minutes later about the carjacking, they doubled back and caught up with Chatman at the intersection of 75th and Jeffery Avenue.

The surveillance videos show Chatman bailing out of the car almost as soon as Toth and Fry get out of their unmarked Ford Crown Victoria.

Toth told detectives he was running to keep up with Chatman and didn't notice an object in his hands, according to the reports released Friday. As they neared the corner, Toth said, he saw Chatman "make a move to his right" just before the shots rang out, according to the case incident report.

Fry, meanwhile, repeated his claim that Chatman had turned toward his partner both in an interview with the Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates police shootings, and in a July 2014 deposition as part of the lawsuit, records show.

"As Mr. Chatman approaches the corner, he makes a slight turn, a subtle turn to the right with his upper body," Fry said in the deposition, according to a transcript. "I see in his right hand ... a small black object which I believed to be a handgun."

The officers' accounts differ from statements given to reporters by Pat Camden, a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, shortly after the shooting. Camden said that during the short foot chase, one of the officers yelled to the other, " 'He's got something in his hand,' and that Chatman had pointed the object.

Camden has acknowledged in a recent deposition, however, that his statements to reporters in police-involved shootings are typically based on hearsay information relayed to him by a union representative at the scene, not details coming directly from investigators or the officer who opened fire.

Clarke and Odom were originally charged with first-degree murder for Chatman's death because their involvement in the carjacking had spurred his shooting. Both pleaded guilty to robbery and were sentenced to 10 years in prison, records show.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 17, 2016, in the News section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "City releases records in fatal police shooting of teen - CHICAGO'S COP CRISIS" —
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